Training tool for rowers wins top prize in BRAINSTORM: The Schoofs Prize for Creativity

Nate Altfeather's Check-meter won him the first-place, $10,000 prize in the 2002 College of Engineering's BRAINSTORM: The Schoofs Prize for Creativity competition. The Check-meter is a lightweight, clamp-mounted, unidirectional accelerometer used to measure negative acceleration, or "check" of a rowing shell. The first-place $2.500 prize in the Tong Prototype Competition went to Tom Johnson for his pneumatically powered shingle stripper. Designed to increase productivity and decrease physical strain for those removing old shingles from roofs, the device also won Johnson one of the three, $1,000 fourth-place prizes in the Brainstorm competition.

Judges Prize for Special Merit, $2,000: Cauterizing Biopsy System by Kelly Stevens. An apparatus and method for reducing and possibly eliminating bleeding in biopsy procedures through the application of radio-frequency heating.

Now in its eighth year, the BRAINSTORM contest awards cash prizes to those whose ideas are judged most creative, novel, innovative and likely to succeed in the marketplace. The Tong Prototype Prize honors the best prototype developed for the competition. The contests are open to all University of Wisconsin-Madison undergraduates.

The competition's judges were Matthew Younkle (principal, Calyx Partners), Winslow Sargeant (electronics program manager, Small Business Innovations Research (SBIR) Program, National Science Foundation) and John G. Bollinger (professor and dean emeritus, University of Wisconsin-Madison College of Engineering.